Religion & Public Memory

 

 

  • The Public Work of Christmas
    • The Public Work of Christmas
  • Sites of Memory
    • Sites of Memory
    • Workshop
    • Keywords
    • Student Participants
    • Acknowledgments
  • Museums
    • Museums, Religion, and the Work of Reconciliation & Remembrance
  • Making Promises
    • About Making Promises
    • Workshop Schedule
    • Public Keynote Lecture
  • Schloss Conversations
    • Venus in Transit
    • Reformation and Refugees
  • Story Nations
    • About Kiinawin Kawindomowin — Story Nations
  • Organizers
    • Pamela Klassen
    • Monique Scheer

Tiffany Hale

October 30, 2020 by Gregory Fewster

Rigid Forms and Flexible Reality: Contextualizing the 1892 Cooper Report

At precisely the time elite Americans abandoned or modified Christian theologies of perdition, American procedural law came to rely ever more strongly on the traditional link between law and the theology of divine punishment: the testimonial oath. While conventional histories of American evidence law tell a rather straightforward modernization story of a move from premodern sacral modes of prooftaking to rational forensic modes of examination, this paper shows that oathtaking did not diminish under modern law reform but significantly expanded with the influence of New York’s code of 1848. For the first time in America, the New York code required all pleadings to be sworn by the parties, and all parties and interested witnesses were made competent to take the oath and testify on the stand. Lawyers at first expected the dread of cross examination to deter perjury, but they quickly adjusted their theories in practice to detect lying under oath, which they believed had become rampant under the code. The lawyers’ faith in their ability to detect truth were stymied, however, as racialized witnesses came before the bar. In order to account for racial disqualifications on testimony in a world increasingly open to party testimony (and perjury), lawyers revived an older theology of perdition, swirling together supposedly premodern and rational modes of investigation well into the twentieth century.

Filed Under: Making Promises

Call for Papers: ‘Making Promises’ Workshop

This interdisciplinary workshop – November 5-7, proposal deadline March 15 – invites scholars to ask what it means to make a promise in a society characterized by legal and religious pluralism. In such conditions of multiplicity, how are public promises made meaningful through appeals to varied transcendent powers and diverse traditions of material culture and embodied emotion? Read more about the call here.

Story Nations

Kiinawin Kawindomowin Story Nations is a digital storytelling collaboration based in Toronto, on the territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. This land has long been … [Read More...]

Sites of Memory

Sites of Memory: Religion, Multiculturalism and the Demands of the Past (September 15-17, 2016) is a comparative workshop focused on how projects of national and religious public memory grapple with the “demands of the past” as they are experienced, … [Read More...]

Recent Posts

  • Dale Turner November 5, 2020
  • Elizabeth Elbourne November 5, 2020
  • Pamela Klassen November 1, 2020
  • Pooyam Tamimi Arab October 30, 2020
  • Sujith Xavier October 30, 2020

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With the support of the Anneliese Maier Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation, Dr. Pamela Klassen of the University of Toronto and Prof. Dr. Monique Scheer, Director of the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut of Historical and Cultural Anthropology, University of Tübingen, are directing a research project on Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies. The project runs from 2015 to […]

How Should We Understand Indigenous Spirituality (in English)? A reflection on the philosophy of listening Indigenous spirituality matters to Indigenous peoples. In this discussion, I am broadly interested in how Indigenous spirituality is used in contemporary Indigenous politics. More specifically, I ask the question: How should we understand Indigenous spirituality in English? My discussion involves […]

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